These were rarely the leading performers of the established London companies, however, unless it so happened that the capital was suffering from a visitation of the plague.

"Starring in the provinces" was not an early occupation of the players of good repute.

As a rule, it was only the inferior actors who quitted town, and as Dekker contemptuously says, "travelled upon the hard hoof from village to village for cheese and buttermilk." "How chances it they travel ?" inquires Hamlet concerning "the tragedians of the city"-- "their _residence_ both in reputation and profit were better both ways." John Stephens, writing in 1615, and describing "a common player," observes, "I prefix the epithet 'common' to distinguish the base and artless appendants of our City companies, which oftentimes start away into rustical wanderings, and then, like Proteus, start back again into the City number." The strollers were of two classes, however.

First, the theatrical companies protected by some great personage, wearing his badge or crest, and styling themselves his "servants"-- just as to this day the Drury Lane troop, under warrant of Davenant's patent, still boast the title of "Her Majesty's Servants"-- who attended at country seats, and gave representations at the request or by the permission of the great people of the neighbourhood; and secondly, the mere unauthorised itinerants, with no claim to distinction beyond such as their own merits accorded to them, who played in barns, or in large inn-yards and rooms, and against whom was especially levelled the Act of Elizabeth declaring that all players, &c., "not licensed by any baron or person of high rank, or by two justices of the peace, should be deemed and treated as rogues and vagabonds." The suppression of the theatres by the Puritans reduced all the players to the condition of strollers of the lowest class.

Legally their occupation was gone altogether.